The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Will PRC Respond to Joint US-Japanese Patrols in the South China Sea With an ADIZ?

I have a short piece on the prospects for joint US-Japanese
air patrols in the South China Sea in the context of the new US-Japan defense
guidelines at the new AT.Go!Read it! Thank you.

I draw the conclusion that the main practical application of
joint patrols is to provide backup to the Philippines if/when they try to
assert their EEZ rights, perhaps at the Reed Bank, site of a much-yearned-for
undersea energy bonanza, after the UNCLOS ruling on the Nine-Dash-Line comes
down.

One issue I’ll explore here is the possibility that the PRC
will declare an ADIZ (Air Defense Identification Zone) in the South China Sea.

I guess it needs pointing out that the ADIZ is not an
exclusion zone.There is zero tolerance
by any nation for uncontrolled overflights of sovereign airspace (which covers
territorial waters up to the 12-mile limit; in contrast to aircraft, foreign naval
vessels can transit through territorial waters).

The ADIZ, on the other hand, as the name indicates, is a more
extensive zone beyond sovereign airspace in which planes are expected to
identify themselves and state their business.It covers nearby international airspace by design and its extent is
pretty much a function of the speed of hostile aircraft and the reaction time
of air defenses.An ADIZ is meant to
establish a zone in which aircraft that don’t identify themselves and announce
their intentions can be intercepted before they can penetrate sovereign
airspace and maybe drop a bomb on somebody.It’s actually a good arrangement for delineating zones of anxiety and,
in theory, makes the world a safer and more orderly place.National ADIZs can even overlap, as the
Taiwan experience demonstrates.

Frequency of actual intercepts within the ADIZ apparently
correlate with paranoia and hostility at any given time.

According to this informative piece in The Aviationist, in
Europe NATO jets scramble to intercept any Russian military aircraft in the
ADIZ.Apparently over Alaska things are
more casual, and in 4 out of 10 cases of lumbering Russian Tupelov bombers
trolling the Alaska ADIZ in the last year, the US chose not to scramble
interceptors:

The
ADIZ is an airspace surrounding a nation or part of it where identification,
location, and control of aircraft over land or water is required in the
interest of national security. This means that any aircraft flying in these air
spaces without authorization may require identification through interception by
fighter aircraft in QRA (Quick Reaction Alert).

…

Military
aircraft that do not intend to enter the national airspace are not required to
identify themselves or otherwise comply with ADIZ procedures but it is a common
practice that any foreign (namely Russian) military aircraft flying close to
the U.S. or Canada airspace, within the ADIZ, is intercepted, identified and
escorted.

In 2013, the PRC set up an ADIZ over the East China Sea to
much moaning and gnashing of teeth and, I might add, a lot of crappy reporting
on how unreasonable it was. In what should have been a blockbuster report but
somehow, you know, vanished without a trace, the Daily Mainichi reported that,
far from being blindsided by PRC ADIZ perfidy, the Japanese government had been
extensively briefed by the PRC prior to declaration of the zone.At the time I participated in the rather
lonely and tedious task of debunking the ADIZ-threat canard and you can read
one of my pieces below.

The US military has a consistent policy of not respecting
anybody’s ADIZ notification practices and immediately dispatched two bombers
from Guam to penetrate the newly-announced ECS ADIZ without prior
notification.US civilian air carriers,
rather intelligently, respect the PRC ADIZ guidelines; Japanese civilian air
carriers, rather less intelligently, do not.

The PRC has been politely deferential to the US on the
matter of military flights inside its East China Sea ADIZ and would presumably
grit its teeth and accept continuation of incessant US military flights over
the South China Sea even if the PRC announced an SCS ADIZ (the PRC seems to
have discarded its aggressive posture toward US surveillance aircraft over the
SCS and near PRC naval facilities on Hainan Island after the P-3 incident of
2001, in which a Chinese fighter pilot died after a mid-air collision and the
P-3 Orion, a turboprop, was forced to make an emergency landing on Hainan
Island).

Japanese aircraft in the SCS would presumably be another
matter.Japanese military aircraft are frequently
intercepted and dicked with in the ECS ADIZ and if Japan Air Self Defense Force
(hereinafter the “Japan Air ‘Self Defense’ (heh heh) Force” start flying around
the SCS two thousand miles from home and in China’s backyard they aren’t going
to be welcomed by the PRC.

Which, I suppose, is the whole point of “joint patrols”.It’s not that the US doesn’t have enough
airplanes to fly around the SCS by itself or Japan likes to waste fuel &
irritate the PRC by performing surveillance the US previously handled itself;
it’s about bringing in Japan under the American aegis to demonstrate that the
US is the indispensable big brother that makes it possible for Japan to pursue
its regional ambitions under its freshly reinterpreted, somewhat bent, and no
longer 100% pacifist constitution.

I suppose a subtext of the new US-Japan defense guidelines the
PRC is supposed to be grateful that the United States, by codifying the involvement
of Japanese forces in US-directed operations, is restraining unilateral
Japanese adventurism in East Asia, but I tend to doubt the PRC sees it that
way.

In any case, it would seem plausible that the PRC might push
back against the appearance of Japanese aircraft in the SCS by announcing an
ADIZ in the South China Sea and either routinely or selectively harassing
Japanese aircraft (and their US companions) with intercepts.

(Possibly ADIZ enforcement could be supported
from airstrips popping up in the SCS as part of the PRC crash island building
program though, as this good overview from Reuters points out, this gambit more likely relates to other salami slicing missions along the
fisheries & maritime enforcement line.)

(Also parenthetically, Taiwan’s military has advised the
legislature it plans to patrol the South China Sea outside of Taiwan’s own ADIZ to support its own South China Sea island claims.Will be interesting to see how PRC handles
that.)

I suspect the US realizes that if Japanese military aircraft
appear in the SCS, there is a high degree of likelihood that the PRC will
declare an ADIZ and start intercepting those planes, with a concurrent rise in
tensions and the possibility of fatal incidents; only question is Is This a
Good Thing?

I am unwilling to join the rest of
China pundits on the fainting couch, overcome with dismay and disapproval at
the PRC’s unilateral declaration of an ADIZ.

All the big kids have an ADIZ.The PRC has an ADIZ.I don’t think it’s going anywhere and we
should get used to it.

To me, the important story is that
Japan is using the ADIZ uproar to claim regional military flight rights that
only the United States claims—and civilian flight rights that nobody, including
the United States enjoys.

This, to me, is part of Prime
Minister Abe’s ambitions to make Japan an independent security peer—and not a
tractable ally—of the United States in East Asia.

And I doubt that the United States
is particularly overjoyed with that, despite the spate of news analyses along
the lines of “America happy that PRC is acting like assertive jerk and
provoking security backlash by Asian democracies.”

Maybe it’s because I’m a clueless dingbat.But maybe it’s because the whole “rising
Japan” i.e. the threat to US preeminence from an ambitious ally provokes
cognitive dissonance for Western journos and pundits fixated on “rising China”
a.k.a. the everreliable and easy to conceptualize alien menace.

Anyway, the ATOl piece has some good
info on the US ADIZ from an FAA
presentation, pointing out that cooperation with the ADIZ regs is an
absolute requirement reinforced by a lengthy set of procedures and measures up
to and including the scrambling of fighter jets.

PM Abe’s call on Japanese military
aircraft and civilian carriers to ignore the PRC ADIZ is simply irresponsible
and, dare I say, “heightens tensions”.

The US-Canada ADIZ dates back to the
Cold War, when the ADIZ was a core component of U.S. defense against some
Soviet bomber lumbering in and dropping one or more of those gigantic nukes on
us.The ADIZ over North America was
supplemented by a series of ADIZ zones covering Soviet access to Atlantic
airspace (just as we maintained a picket line against Soviet submarines in
order to bottle them up in contiguous Russian waters).

Until 2006, the Iceland ADIZ was policed by the 85th
Group (the “Guardians of the North” as their motto stated) of the USAF 48th
Fighter Wing based in the UK.

Nowadays NATO members patrol the
airspace of Iceland, the Baltic republics, and the Balkan states to protect
Russia from surprise attack (just kidding!).

Airspace over Greenland is pretty
much in the hands of the American airbase at Thule.

Further down, the ELK Area (the area
off the coast of Newfoundland between Iceland and the US East Coast) is under
the control of the Canadian Maritime Command (CONMARCOM).Nobody flies into that zone without filing a
flight plan. (pg.
24).

4. In the
interest of flight safety it is essential that CANMARCOM be informed in advance
of all flights or proposed flight in or through Area ELK. Aircraft flight
level(s), track and approximate times of ELK penetration and exit are required.
Military aircraft are encouraged to communicate directly with CANMARCOM. On
prior request, frequencies will be assigned on which to report position and
obtain ELK clearance. ASW aircraft will be routed clear of all known military
and civil traffic.

And, in a heads-up for an overly
enthusiastic critic on ATOl comments, the ELK region covers the southerly
flightpath between the North American mainland and Iceland, which could be
employed by planes entering the ADIZ but flying PARALLEL to the US coast (There
has been a lot of misleading chaff about how the Chinese should not be allowed
to hassle planes that are flying parallel to their coastline but not on a
heading to penetrate PRC airspace.Before you enter the US ADIZ on any heading, you are required to file a
flight plan.Inside the ADIZ you are
required to turn on your identification and altitude transponders, respond to
radio calls, and obey instructions from fighter jets if they scramble to
intercept.No exceptions for parallel
flight.Especially since my
sophisticated aeronautical friends tell me that planes have the ability to turn
left and right or, as they say, “port and starboard”.It wouldn’t make much sense to declare an
ADIZ to achieve early warning, then let somebody around inside it to fly really
close but PARALLEL to the coast without filing a flight plan and hope the guy
doesn’t turn right at the last minute and launch a missile.)

To me, the whole parallel flight
thing is a canard; more specifically, an attempt by the United States to avoid
the completely untenable position of denying the PRC’s right to declare an
ADIZ, but at the same time find a way to give some aid and comfort to Japan by
trying to carve out an exclusion for Japanese flights along the Chinese
coastline and headed to the Senkakus.

With the rise of the ballistic
missile, the strategic bomber justification for the US/Canada ADIZ has
evaporated.But the U.S. is pretty
serious about the ADIZ in order to interdict drug smuggling and deal with terrorism.

Since 9/11, the ADIZ has been
supplemented by TFRs--Temporary Flight Restrictions—within the United States,
usually in relation to presidential travel.US fighter jets also provide security patrols for matters of tremendous
national importance—like the Super Bowl!(Unless, as the FAA illustration implies, we are trying to deter our
enemies with the inexpensive alternative of unconvincing Photoshopped images).

In discussing the last component of
the US ADIZ, Alaska, a website that is apparently equally devoted to
Sarah Palin and opposed to President Obama provided this nugget
from 2012:

It
is being reported that two Russian Bear
bombers were intercepted while flying near the west coast of the United States
on the 4th of July, an obvious taunt from the Russians on our nation’s most
important day.

This is the second incident in the past
two weeks, where Russian nuclear capable bombers have entered, or come near
U.S. air space.

This is nothing new, as the Russians are
known to violate American air space often. On Sarah Palin’s watch, as Governor
of Alaska, and Commander-in-Chief, the Alaska Air National Guard’s 176th Wing
routinely escorted the Russians out of Alaskan air space. In fact, the 176th
received the Air Force’s Outstanding Unit Award for its service to the nation .
Part of the citation noted:

The 176th Air Control Squadron maintained
North American air sovereignty by detecting, monitoring and escorting 22
Russian bombers from within its area of operations.

As you can see, the 176th
Air Control Squadron is an Air National Guard outfit, not a USAF operation.About 90% of US air defense is handled by ANG
units.And, yes, on the occasions that
George W. Bush flew for the Texas Air National Guard as part of the 147th
Reconnaissance Wing , we can assume he was patrolling the US ADIZ.

3 comments:

"(which covers territorial waters up to the 12-mile limit; in contrast to aircraft, foreign naval vessels can transit through territorial waters)"

Only in straits such as the Straits of Hormuz which pisses the Iranians off. But they are probably even more pissed off by thye US Navy doing thing it shouldn't while in transit passage like not pointing your guns at anyone or firing off surface to air missiles.